**5,9 menos elevado**

00:20 Jul 16, 2011 

I agree. The plot thickens. I now have a lot of questions* for the author, and I will be passing this one on as well. If the author agrees to Paul's suggestion, I will re-open the question and award the points. (*Actually, my questions relate to what appear to be obvious mistakes. My document is supposed to go straight to a printer in China with only a light proofreading, and I'm troubled that these lapses won't get caught.)

20:54 Jul 15, 2011 

doesn't mean much in English. Indeed, my first impression when reading the phrase was that it goes 4.9 times the other way, i.e., instead of the earthquake causing 77.3 million soles in damage, these steps would have made the earthquake cause 378.77 million soles in improvements. This looks like a clear case of GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).

18:41 Jul 15, 2011 

Thanks to Phil and Paul, I don't feel quite so crazy. This morning I received the original English from the client. It turns out that the Spanish was a translation, and indeed the original English said '5.9 times less'. Who knew?

16:48 Jul 15, 2011 

I agree with Paul. Yes, the literal translation is "5.9 times lower", but unlike "5.9 times higher", it's a difficult concept to understand in English.

11:50 Jul 15, 2011 

There is a Russian construction that translates literally this way. What the Russian construction means is "divide by", so in this case, "5.9 times lower" than 77.3 would be 77.3/5.9 = 13.10. When translating from Russian, I usually phrase it as a percentage reduction, in this case, an 83% reduction.